The Big Ideas That Can Banish Trolls

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Some years ago, I had a friend who got into trouble on the internet. He was writing a book that took a strong stance on a controversial topic and had been talking about it on social media. He didn’t have a large following, but activists who opposed his view of the issue began to notice and decided that he needed punishing for wrongthink.

Their angry invective about his work spread the conversation to people who anonymously and deliberately seek to offend and provoke others online—and these trolls began to abuse my friend relentlessly. “People are telling me to kill myself!” he told me, with desperation in his voice. He started worrying about being doxxed, or worse. “Do I need private security? Maybe I should move.”

Out of curiosity, I asked my friend how much time he was then spending on social media, monitoring all the abuse. “Pretty much all day,” he said. This made sense to him because he felt the gravity of the situation demanded his full attention: A threat’s a threat, right? I made one simple suggestion: Delete the apps and stop interacting with social media for a week. He took my advice reluctantly, but over the next few days, he stopped thinking about the predicament so much. By the time he reopened the apps, he found that the trolls had largely moved on to new victims and targets.

What my friend learned was that this harassment, which had seemed very real to him, could be erased almost completely by using two powerful weapons: perception and attention. What works in our internet-based culture can apply equally well to other areas of modern life. These two tools can help you eradicate problems that once seemed insoluble.

[Read: The rise of the troll]

What is, for you, the reality behind these lines you’re reading? Is it the ones and zeros that compose the computer code that makes these words visible on a screen? Or is what’s real the words themselves as linguistic signs with meaning? Or does the underlying reality reside in the concepts and ideas that the words evoke in your brain? For the philosopher Edmund Husserl, father of phenomenology, the latter is the truth. What you experience may differ from some objective reality, but this is not relevant. The reality that matters, Husserl argued, is what you perceive.

The next question, then, is where does that perception come from? According to the cognitive psychologist Donald D. Hoffman and his colleagues, “Our perceptual systems, like our limbs and livers, have been shaped by natural selection.” That is, you perceive what evolution has determined best aids your safety, survival, and gene propagation.

For example, you might find a mushroom in the forest that is, objectively speaking, a fungus named Amanita phalloides. But to you—if you perceive it appropriately—the death cap is a source of deadly poison to be avoided at all costs. In this, and many things, relying on your perception as your reality is a very good thing.

And yet, perception can also lead you astray. What you perceive might be based in error—a historical case in point being the belief common until the 19th century that tomatoes were poisonous. So you would have been perceiving them as dangerous, whereas they are, in fact, nutritious and delicious. Alternatively, you can be deceived or manipulated by malefactors—people who want you to fear something or someone to control your behavior, such as voting a particular way or following certain media. The trolling that messed with my friend’s head was akin to this.

Finally, perception can be distorted by glitches in your brain. A case of this is the “rubber-hand illusion.” In a famous 1998 experiment, subjects watched a rubber hand being stroked by a paintbrush, while their own hand—which was behind a screen—was simultaneously stroked. They knew this was the case, but after 10 minutes, more than half of the subjects could not help perceiving the rubber hand as authentically part of their own body. As one participant put it, “I found myself looking at the dummy hand thinking it was actually my own.” Recent research by neuroscientists shows that this effect occurs because, in response to these contradictory stimuli, the brain regulates the primary motor cortex in a way that lowers the sense of connection with the actual body part and incorporates the alien body part.

This brings us back to the perception created by social media, which is prone to all the distortions of objective reality listed above: They lead you to misperceive phantom threats as real ones, because even a single, remote person acting sociopathically can create the illusion of a troll army. Your brain naturally treats a threatening or abusive person on X the way it would treat the presence of a hostile intruder in your house. I don’t discount the chance in extreme cases that a cyber threat can turn into a real one, but the research about cyberbullying describes the harms as much more commonly psychological, not physical, in nature.

[Read: The false equation of atheism and intellectual sophistication]

The main weapon that online bullies and trolls possess is your brain—specifically, your brain’s tendency to create reality around the perception of a threat, because cyberabuse is the kind of menace that the limbic system was evolved to perceive: When that system is triggered by hostile action from a stranger, your brain instinctively thinks that your physical safety is at risk.

Your first line of defense, then, is perception itself. Imagine I told you that you had the power to turn a scary, violent attacker on the street into a pathetic, broken little person staring all day long at his computer screen. That’s basically what you can do with a better grasp of how trolling works. Studies published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences in 2014 found that bullies on the internet tend to possess psychopathic traits such as sadism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy—the “Dark Triad” (or “Tetrad”) I’ve written about previously. Additional research has shown that they themselves are disproportionately cyberbullied; moreover, young-adult Dark Triads are also far more likely to be anxious, depressed, and suicidal than their population average. In real life, these bullying trolls are people you might pity more than fear.

Just as you have some control over your perception, you also have control over your attention. If your perception of a social-media troll matched their actual psychological profile, your natural response to being trolled might change from engagement to avoidance tinged with compassion. If an obnoxious Dark Triad type tried to confront you in public—unlikely though that is, given their typical preference for hiding behind internet anonymity—you would almost certainly just cross the street to avoid any interaction. You can apply the same logic in the virtual world by recalling the internet adage “Don’t feed the trolls.” The point of trolling is to get a reaction, so refusing to engage starves the beast. My own way of practicing this is simply to ignore anyone who is anonymous online. Effectively, they don’t exist.

If you do get sucked into a more serious internet conflagration—as my friend did—you might try a more systematic denial of attention and withdraw from your habitual platforms entirely for a time. I recommend a complete social-media cleanse of at least a week or two every year, regardless of whether you’ve encountered any digital predators. If you use that cleanse to delete the app, you rid yourself of the bothersome bullies as well.

None of these private strategies eliminates the value of more collective interventions, of course. Internet psychopathy is a social nuisance that lowers life quality for most people in one way or another. The approaches I suggest here are the equivalent of soundproofing your house against nuisance neighbors. Taking your own defensive measures doesn’t preclude the passing of laws to protect the whole neighborhood from antisocial behavior. Social-media companies should find better ways to eliminate pathological behavior as well as protect free speech.

[Read: The drunk-text decade]

My friend made the internet trolls disappear from his life by resisting the default responses of his own brain: He deliberately changed his perception and withdrew his attention. Because this worked like a charm, it got him thinking: Were there other areas of his life where this strategy could work? After getting informed about alcohol use, he changed his perception of drinking and avoided engaging with the substance. He also decided to reevaluate what had been his favorite news organization; he then saw it in a much more skeptical light, so he withdrew his attention by unsubscribing. He has used the same technique to tackle various relationships and behaviors that he realized were toxic and holding him back. He says he feels free.

The threats from trolls and cyberbullies are one thing, but not all threats should be ignored. If you feel a strange lump in your armpit, say, trying to perceive it differently or refusing to give it your attention is foolish and dangerous. A potential health emergency is unlikely to be something you can avoid, but in much of what happens in life, you probably have more control than you think. The strategic use of perception and attention can set you free too.